La Tentation Néoclassique: Les Plafonds Peints Romains De Panini À Mengs’, in Jean-Marc Olivesi (Ed.), ‘Les Cieux En Gloire’
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The following is the original English text of: Marshall, David R., ‘La tentation néoclassique: les plafonds peints romains de Panini à Mengs’, in Jean-Marc Olivesi (ed.), ‘Les Cieux en Gloire’. Bozzetti et modelli pour les eglises et les palais de la Rome Baroque, Ajaccio, 2002, pp. 377-386. La tentation néoclassique: les plafonds peints romains de Panini à Mengs In 1711 Giovanni Paolo Panini arrived in Rome from Piacenza; fifty years later in 1761 Anton Raphael Mengs left Rome for Madrid. The former, better known as a painter of architectural capricci and vedute, was the heir to the Bolognese Baroque tradition of quadratura, or illusionistic architectural painting; the latter at the Galleria Albani rejected Baroque illusionism for the strict quadro riportato, or fictive framed easel painting, and so produced the first Neoclassical ceiling. Their paths seem hardly to have crossed, yet both worked for Cardinal Alessandro Albani, and both had to accommodate themselves to the mainstream of Roman ceiling painting, the illusionistic tradition stemming from Pietro da Cortona and reformulated in the last quarter of the seventeenth century in terms of an opposition between Carlo Maratta and G.B. Gaulli, Il Baciccio. Common to the masterpieces of these artists—the ceiling of the Salone of the Palazzo Altieri and the vault of the Gesù—is the ceiling cartouche, or rectangular field with semicircular ends, a framing motif that played so conspicuous a part in subsequent Roman ceilings that the history of the eighteenth-century Roman ceiling can be written in terms of the history of the relationship between the cartouche and the rest of the ceiling. The ceiling cartouche from Maratta to Mengs In the Triumph of Clemency in the Palazzo Altieri (1674-75) (modelli, cats. 81, 82), Maratta adopted a di sotto in sù perspective, but suppressed the implied diagonal movement from low down inside the room to high up in the heavens implicit in such a scheme, as would be exploited to maximum illusionistic effect by Baciccio in the Gesù a year or two later (salle II). Any tendency for the lowest group to enter the viewer’s space is suppressed by the horizon, which almost physically reorients the spectator’s viewing away from a neck-craning verticality to a quadro riportato horizontality. Similarly the angels at the top of the field are tied tightly to the frame to stop them fizzing away into the heavens. Having thus firmly anchored his composition to the plane at the ends of the field, Maratta was free to develop the middle with illusionistic spatial developments, such as the downward plunge of Public Felicity, or the sharp foreshortening and downward gaze of Clemency. As the viewer’s attention approaches the sides the plane is reasserted; Prudence is almost frontal, while Fortitude, although steeply foreshortened, is tied to the frame by the long fold of his cloak. Outside the frame, illusionism is given fuller reign, but through the controlled illusionism of grisaille figures, roof beams and cornices distinct from the figured field. Giuseppe Chiari, as Maratta’s closest follower, not unexpectedly followed his master closely in his Glory of St Clement at S. Clemente (1714) (modello, cat. 85), even down to the stabilizing horizon, while further downplaying the di sotto in sù perspective. Being set into a flat coffered ceiling, an illusionistic relationship with the ceiling was necessarily precluded. In Luigi Garzi’s Glory of S. Catherine of Siena at S. Caterina a Magnanapoli (1713) (cf. cat. 92), Maratta’s High Baroque responsiveness to the illusionistic implications of the zig-zag composition and the volumes of figures in space is fading. Outside the frame, the Rococo swags and fictive stucco putti have lost the plasticity of the comparable elements in the Maratta, and are becoming reduced to surface decoration. The distinction between ceiling and figured field threatens to disappear, as would occur with French Rococo interiors. The confrontation between Baroque illusionism and Rococo ornament is most acute in Aureliano Milano’s ceiling of 1735 in the Salone degli Specchi in the Palazzo Doria Pamphili. The cartouche containing the Battle of the Gods and Giants is set within a frescoed ceiling that must accommodate itself to a fully Rococo interior, complete with serpentine consoles, pier glasses and carved pelmets. The cartouche casts a fictive shadow like the lateral quadi riportati of the Galleria Farnese (Prelude B, Dessins), while the scene within, in contrast to Maratta’s, employs a Baciccesque diagonal thrust from within to without with fictive rocks plunging into the viewer’s space at the lower end. Yet the illusionism is devoid of the brio of Baciccio or Cortona and the scene has a certain flatness that is reinforced by the other vault scenes, which are effectively quadri riportati. Packing more illusionistic punch are the framing figures, but while the Michelangesque spandrel grisailles are not ineffective, the ‘real’ figures are unnaturally placed, and the space against which they are set consists or ornamental strapwork that has little illusionistic logic. More effective are the putti playing games with the Pamphili dove in the conched spandrels, which float plausibly in the fictive space of the spandrel and interact effectively with the carved and gilded window pelmets, anticipating the preference for this kind of contained illusionism of Mengs and Marchetti. In Corrado Giaquinto’s S. Croce ceiling of 1744 the cartouche frame employs a Rococo complexity of contour, and its carved pearl grey and gilded ornaments play no illusionistic games. Within the frame Giaquinto disposes his forms effectively as surface pattern, making original use of S. Michael as a stablilising vertical at the bottom, while avoiding flatness by developing his figure composition fully in depth. Yet the whole turns its back on Baroque illusionism, and in this respect is less distant from Mengs’ Parnassus (1760-61) at the Villa Albani than might at first appear. Paradoxically, Mengs, while ruthlessly, and famously, returning the central figured field to the kind of strict quadro riportato that had not been seen since Reni’s Aurora (1613, Casino dell’Aurora, Palazzo Rospigliosi-Pallavicini, cf. cat. Prelude A, g) and returning the cartouche field to rectilinearity by filling the ends with shallow fictive reliefs, nevertheless permits illusionistic oculi at either end. In doing so, Mengs (or Carlo Marchionni, who probably designed the overall scheme of the ceiling) makes a polemical Neoclassical statement about the distinctions between forms. The oculi are devoid of decorative elaboration, and almost as rational in their perspective as Mantegna’s oculus in the Camera degli Sposi at Mantua. The rest of the vault is treated with fictive low relief grotesque ornament, and even in the spandrels fictive spatial development is confined to putti that project in high relief. That such an extreme statement is owed as much to Cardinal Albani and the Neoclassical culture of his court centred on Winckelmann, is demonstrated by Mengs’ slightly earlier ceiling at S. Eusebio (1757-59), which is conceived as a segment of a Correggio dome glory fitted to the cartouche format. In its struggle with the flattening and framing effect of the cartouche, Correggiesque illusionism wins: although the band of musical angels is tied to the step in the cartouche, winged cherub heads spill over the frame, which swells under pressure from the main group, while the angled ascent through to the glory centred in the upper semicircle is unimpeded. Even more than a decade later than the Villa Albani, Mengs’ ceiling in the Sala dei Papiri in the Vatican (1773) refuses to go so far, even as it acknowledges the Renaissance revivalism of the Villa Albani in Cristoforo Unterberger’s neo-Renaissance grotesques, in the sculptural thrones in the manner of Pinturicchio and Michelangelo, and in the Parmigianinesque flanking putti. The main field, no longer a cartouche but a rectangle with scalloped corners, likewise acknowledges the revival of the quadro riportato at the Villa Albani, but the scene within seems reluctant to be contained by its frame. The pictorial space, no longer the shallow, frieze-like classicism of the Villa Albani, nor yet an Albertian spatial box, tunnels back in layers until it reaches the Vatican Ariadne in a way reminiscent of the penetration of the vault by the glories in Baroque ceilings. And although the figure of Fame is clamped by its wing in a Marattesque way behind the frame, it manages to escape the space of the quadro riportato to join the putti and swans in the contained illusionistic spaces of the vault penetrations, spaces exploited by Milani at the Palazzo Doria but denied at the Villa Albani. The ceiling thus betrays a tension between the quadro riportato format and illusionistic space. This tension would be resolved in the next decade at the Villa Borghese, where, in the ceiling of the Stanza di Apollo e Daphne, the dogmatic quadro riportato of Pietro Angeletti’s central canvas of Apollo and Daphne (1780-85) is set into a quadratura setting by Giovanni Battista Marchetti (1786) which carves into the cove of the vault a series of powerfully illusionistic niches. It is as if such contained spaces were a permissible fiction because they accepted the principle of the separation of fictive space from pictorial field stated so dogmatically in the Galleria Albani, while permitting the enjoyment of the delights of illusionism that Rome was not yet ready to renounce. Panini and quadratura in the Settecento. The dominance of the Maratta cartouche meant that Roman ceiling painting in the eighteenth century resisted quadratura. Even during the later seventeenth century, mainstream Bolognese quadratura, with its teaming of figure painter and quadraturista, its complex fictive structures and fussy ornament, had little currency, the most important example being the Apotheosis of St Dominic by Domenico Maria Canuti and Enrico Haffner at SS.